Five reasons why this Club World Cup is a load of old bollocks
Sometimes we’re thrown a feature idea that brings to mind our favourite Zapp Brannigan quote from Futurama:
‘My instinct is to hide in this barrel, like the wily fish.’
Anyway, apropos of nothing, here are five reasons why the Club World Cup is a right load of old bollocks. And this does sort of matter, because as we touched on here, if this were done right it could definitely be quite good.
The obvious, naked cynicism
Look, we like to think we’re not sweet summer children here at F365. We know that no elite-level football is whiter than white and purer than pure. We know there are a lot of dodgy people and organisations involved at all levels of all our favourite tournaments.
But for f*ck’s sake at least make some token effort to conceal it. In some way we suppose we should admire the Club World Cup for its sheer brazen lack of f*cks given, for its willingness to make absolutely no attempt to be anything other than what it is. There is a kind of weird honesty to the whole grubby caper.
From the machinations to conveniently get Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami into the main draw, to Gianni Infantino’s desperate bid to convince someone, anyone, involved to do a quick deal for Cristiano Ronaldo before the tournament kicked off, it has been very obvious that this has never been a tournament worried primarily about sporting integrity. Or for that matter worried all that much about actual football.
The teams
That said, you do wonder whether FIFA might have actually been better off doing a bit more of the strategic finessing of the rules that got Lionel Messi and his mates into the tournament, because by any possible measure of success for this tournament they have undeniably made a bollocks of the combatants.
This is not to throw shade at any of the teams involved, with the Actual World Cup-style geographical spread one of the admirable qualities of a tournament (even if that itself is very obviously a result of aforementioned cynical self-interest than genuine grow-the-game egalitarianism).
And there has to be acknowledgement that with club football there probably is no perfect way to solve the problem of identifying 32 qualifiers over a four-year period.
But when your tournament to crown the best team in the world takes place without the champions of England, Spain or Italy, you have probably f*cked it up a little bit somewhere down the line.
Now of course it’s equally fair to say those teams have done that by failing to get themselves into the tournament. But it’s weird really that the soundly-reasoned two-teams-per-country rule that represents one rare attempt at fairness has ended up robbing the tournament of both Barcelona and Liverpool.
That’s an avoidable own goal no matter what metric you want to use to rate the ‘success’ or otherwise of this tournament: two clubs among the handful of very biggest in the world, both of whom are demonstrably currently very good indeed, and neither of them here.
The relief FIFA must have felt at avoiding the awkward questions that might have arisen had the Champions League final been between Arsenal and Barca – two teams not involved here yet very obviously among Europe’s finest at this time.
We’re not having a go at Chelsea here, but they are an obvious rogue element; a team that is here because an almost entirely different Chelsea team won the Big Cup all the way back in 2021, and a team that has spent much of the intervening four years being conspicuously crap.
Just to artlessly hammer home the point further, the Chelsea starting XI that secured the club their spot at this tournament by beating Man City in a final watched by only 14,000 fans because of Covid restrictions was: Mendy, James, Azpilicueta, Thiago Silva, Rudiger, Chilwell, Jorginho, Kante, Havertz, Mount, Werner.
Timo Werner, for crying out loud. It’s an obvious and perhaps insoluble point, but a Club World Cup staged every four years runs a far higher risk than the international version of falling victim to this due to the inevitably greater flux that exists within club squads.
We are also aware that we are ourselves guilty of criticising FIFA for both fudging their qualification rules for Messi and co. and then criticising them for not doing so elsewhere, but hey, nobody said shooting fish in a barrel was easy.
The pathetic moral weakness
Weakness might not be strong enough there. Cowardice might be more apt with FIFA facing backlash from campaigners for scaling back anti-discrimination and anti-racism messaging at the Club World Cup in favour of the far woollier motivational-poster guff of ‘Football Unites The World’.
It’s not quite the same level of clarity as the ‘No Discrimination’ branding that was visible even in Qatar during a World Cup that was itself deeply problematic for all kinds of reasons, is it?
And in truth it exposes every anti-discrimination and anti-racism message from FIFA as a sham, which is a scandal and a tragedy, because football is the global game and it does have the power to shift the needle.
But if you are only brave enough to have the courage of your anti-discrimination convictions in places where that is uncontroversial because there isn’t a government currently engaged in state-mandated discrimination, then actually you have no message at all.
It’s just piss-weak stuff from a global governing body that appears to have been bought and sold by Saudi Arabia, who are indirectly yet very obviously bankrolling this event via their investment in TV rights-holders DAZN, and are also too timid to risk upsetting the USA’s idiot king.
Sorry to inflict an actual serious one on you all here. Should have come with more warning.
The timing
Were this a tournament that was primarily about the best football teams playing the best possible football then as well as making sure the best actual football teams were present, then it probably also wouldn’t be a 64-match tournament taking place right after an exhausting season and directly on the back of the June international break.
There are players here who haven’t stopped for 10 months. We get that plenty of people still have limited sympathy for the physical and mental toll this takes on people who are undeniably well remunerated for their troubles, but even if you don’t care about the player welfare angle (and you should) then there is an obvious and unavoidable impact on quality.
Three goalless draws and 10-0 and 4-0 wipeouts within the first 10 matches surely wasn’t on anybody’s wishlist – again, no matter what their metric for measuring success – although we must admit to being halfway interested in the idea of Group A remaining entirely goalless through the two remaining matchdays.
The Americans
Don’t worry, we’re not about to engage in some tired stereotypes about Americans not being able to understand ‘soccer’ (er, it’s called football actually, guys!) or enjoy it.
They do and they can. But they are demonstrably unarsed about this tournament. And you know what? Fair f*cks to them, they are right not to be arsed. The tumbling ticket prices haven’t solved the problem of games being played out in front of empty stands in cavernous stadiums that will for sure be full a year from now when the actual World Cup takes place.
So yes, Americans can and do understand and follow football with a passion. And we get that it’s almost running as a test event for the World Cup next year. And yes, when FIFA first planned this souped-up Club World Cup they were originally planning to hold the first one in 2021.
But it’s still the case that the USA was not the best place to host the first one of these to get the excitement going.
The long-term goal of the Club World Cup may fairly nakedly and obviously be to further dilute the dominance of the traditional European and South American heartlands, but it would surely still have been better to acknowledge the current reality of football means that, for now at least, those are the places where all the plausible winners and thus the greatest potential interest reside and at least start off by hosting the inaugural tournament somewhere on one of those continents.